The next morning arrived wrapped in fog and faint drizzle—Seoul in grayscale.
Tae Seon-woo sipped his tea in silence, standing by the tall windows of his office, watching as students filtered through the courtyard below. The faint murmur of conversation carried upward, but none of it reached him. Not really.
His lectures were finished for the day, but he remained. As always. A creature of habit. A man who found comfort in paper, stillness, and the space between words.
And yet-
There was a disruption. A shift in rhythm. Not loud, but persistent.
Han Jea-hyun.
The boy's presence lingered longer than it should have. Not his voice, or scent, or even his face—but the way his words nested in the back of Tae's mind like a stray annotation in a beloved book. Irreverent. Intrusive.
"You're all ice on the outside, but I bet there's a fire waiting to break through."
Tae set his cup down.
Discipline, he reminded himself. Routine. Distance.
He returned to grading midterm essays.
Or tried to.
——
Two floors down, Jea-hyun sat sprawled across a too-small desk in the library's open study area, headphones dangling from one ear, half-skimming an article on gender performance in modern literature.
The text blurred quickly. Not from boredom, though that certainly didn't help.
No, it was him.
Tae Seon-woo.
That man had something deeply wrong with him—too still, too composed, like he'd swallowed centuries of silence and wore it like perfume. And yet, Jea-hyun couldn't stop thinking about the slight narrowing of his eyes when challenged. That carefully folded page. The way he said "I'm not acting," like it was a threat and a confession.
"Dude," Minho's voice interrupted, dry and low. "Are you glaring at a comma?"
Jea-hyun blinked. "Huh?"
Minho leaned back in his chair, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "You've been reading the same paragraph for fifteen minutes. What's her name?"
Jea-hyun rolled his eyes. "It's not like that."
"Mm." Minho raised an eyebrow. "So you're just emotionally invested in punctuation now?"
Jea-hyun tossed a pen at him.
Minho caught it effortlessly. "Fine. Don't talk about it. Just stop staring at your screen like it owes you money."
Later that afternoon, the hallway outside the Literature Department felt unusually quiet. Most professors had already gone home, and only the sound of distant footfalls broke the silence.
Jea-hyun wasn't sure why he was there. Not exactly.
He told himself he just wanted to return a text book he accidentally packed down in a rush—a technicality, really. Nothing strange about a student returning something borrowed.
Still, he hesitated outside the office door, fist hovering mid-air, not knocking Inside,
he could hear faint classical music. Low. Precise. Just like everything else in that damn office.
He knocked twice—sharp, deliberate.
No answer.
He knocked again.
Silence.
He turned to leave, but the door clicked softly open before he could take a full step.
Tae stood there, sleeve rolled to his elbow, a pen still in hand.
"You're not on the roster for my 2nd-year seminar," he said.
"I'm not," Jea-hyun replied, holding up the book. "Just returning this."
Tae didn't move.
For a moment, Jea-hyun debated saying something clever. Something scandalous. But the words stuck. Not out of shyness—he didn't do shy—but because Tae's gaze had that stillness again. Like he was reading Jea-hyun back, line by line.
He handed the book over, muttering something under his breath
Tae took it carefully, fingertips brushing just once.
Jea-hyun gave a half-grin. "What, surprised I can read?"
"No," Tae said, finally stepping back into the office, door beginning to close. "Surprised you're still pretending that's the only reason you came."
Before Jea-hyun could respond, the door clicked shut—quiet, final.
But not unfriendly.
Not quite.